This City Never Sleeps At Night

15 - Changing A Lightbulb Can Do A Lot For You

They are getting closer; he can sense it.

The wind of the busy city ruffles his hair and chills his ears, making little whooshing noises that dance around his head.

"You've been standing on the edge of that building dramatically for, like, three minutes." An unimpressed voice says from behind him.

Right. His allies.

One of them is just happily humming away, rocking back and forth, while the other is brooding ominously like a storm. Teenagers... That's why he's never having kids. That, and one other reason.

Huffing, he turns back and shoves the first hybrid off the roof. A splatting sound comes from the pavement below, followed by a still-enthusiastic, "I'm okaaaaaaaay!"

A smirk pulls at his lips. As... patchwork as his allies are, they're also quite funny. Besides, he's wanted to shove someone off a roof for a long time and it never gets old, especially when no one gets hurt.

"Listen, I know we're getting closer," He insisted to the tall teenager. The guy isn't even that tall, but alas, he still reaches far above him.

"Closer to what?" His ally shoots back. "I'm losing morale here, glorious leader." The sarcasm is quite cutting.

"Fine." He sighed. "I suppose it's time we had a little talk on who exactly I'm looking for... and why."

Ranboo stumbled into the apartment, hitting his head on the doorframe in his haste and cursing in the garbled language he grew up with.

Seeing more and more vigilantes was so surreal. There was the Dice trio, consisting of Gambit, Slimeball, and Plasma, and there was the Jade trio, Hollywood and Inferno and Waterfall...

And there was the Chaos duo; Dream and Sapnap. Then some of the more stand-alone heroes and villains like Capricorn; a hallucinogenic-themed villain. Tubbo always seemed to get twitchy when he was brought up. Maybe they had a feud or something like that.

And then there were all the legions of vigilantes and minor heroes that still weren't enough to keep high-ranking villains under control.

And the fourth parties like Grapnel; mercenaries and assassins and runaways.

It hurt his head to think about it, but it also made him feel better for multiple reasons. One, he was sorting through all the information; getting it all nice and filed and neat in his brain. And two... Two, it reminded him that he and Tommy and Tubbo weren't alone. They didn't have to take on the entire world by themselves.

But it was hard to remember.

Ranboo had severe memory problems that could go from forgetting as little as a conversation to as much as an entire year. He didn't remember most of his life until he met Tubbo in the rain that day.  

Maybe it was a brain condition, or maybe he just had too much on his mind. Ranboo slid the hypothesis into a file he had mentally labeled 'Mysteries about myself I need to solve but probably never will'.

But where was he...? Memory problems, hurting his head, assassins, vigilantes, ah, right, Tommy. Oh shit.

Tommy had been out all night... This had been happening much more frequently, and Tubbo had said it had started around the time some random guy burst into their apartment and started interrogating him.

Ranboo hadn't been there, but it sounded a bit scary. Apparently, Tommy and the random guy were friends?

Oh, right, before he'd been thinking about Tommy, he had a job he needed to get to. Odd jobs were very... odd. This one, he'd been asked to change lightbulbs. Quite easy for him; towering over others at 7'1.